Newspapers go all-in for copyright fight against clipping service

Is Meltwater News a search engine or a copycat news service?

A copyright battle between The Associated Press and an online news-clipping service is reaching a climax, and the case could have significant implications for fair use. AP sued Meltwater Group last year, arguing the "reputation management" company had a "parasitic business model" that violated copyright. Meltwater is defending the case, arguing that it is merely a search engine.

Meltwater News is a media-monitoring service that helps corporations track what's being said about them in press outlets online. The company boasts that it can "track keywords, phrases, and topics in over 192,000 sources from over 190 countries and 100 languages" throughout the day. It doesn't send its subscribers full articles, but does copy snippets and headlines then provide links to full stories—like Google News.

Last week, the nation's largest newspapers lined up to tell the New York federal judge considering the case that they support the AP. An amicus brief [PDF] was filed by The New York Times, The McClatchy Company, Advance Publications, and the Newspaper Association of America, which represents 200 newspapers around the country. In the brief, they argue that Meltwater isn't a search engine—it's a competitor.

The newspapers argue that Meltwater isn't a "search engine," but a competitor undercutting their own news-clipping businesses. In the brief, the publishers say that Meltwater is a threat to their own digital businesses, which are supported in part by revenue from "other publishers and users and aggregators." Those revenue streams cannot be "sustained if news organizations are unable to protect their news reports from the wholesale copying and redistribution by free-riders like Meltwater." They continue:

If the massive, systematic copying of expression engaged in by Meltwater is held to be fair use, the AP (and others) would lose not only the revenues that Meltwater and others of its ilk should have been paying, but also the revenue that other media monitoring services and aggregators have been and are paying for licenses, based on their correct understanding that the routine commercial copying of the amount of expression taken by Meltwater is not fair use. A holding of fair use here would evaporate those revenues in short order.

... By contrast, a decision that Meltwater's systematic, wholesale, daily commercial copying and reselling of the AP's expression into AP's existing and expected markets is not fair use would not impair Meltwater's ability to serve its customers. It would simply obligate Meltwater to pay for the expressive content that is central to its business, just as it (presumably) pays for other costs (rent, power, insurance) without stealing them, or demanding—on the basis of some imagined public interest—an entitlement to use them without payment.

A selective news search such as Meltwater can't be compared to a search engine, the brief argues. Clipping services have existed for decades. Originally, they remunerated the newspapers by buying multiple copies. After the creation of the photocopier, they started paying licensing fees via the Copyright Clearance Center.

Of course, Meltwater isn't providing customers with full copies of articles, like traditional press-clipping services did. But the newspapers argue it's cheating them by giving away "the most valuable expression news media create and market, namely headlines and their ledes." Meltwater customers don't want a just-the-facts report, but rather want to "gauge tone and resonance and detail."

The brief lists the differences between Meltwater and a news search engine. It notes that Meltwater:

carefully limits those to whom it delivers content (its paying clients who have contracted for its services), and is specifically targeted to and used for only business purposes;

sharply limits what it searches (news articles from a defined list of content providers), and uses that defined content on a regular, continuing, systematic basis, as opposed to the ad hoc searches undertaken through a search engine like Google;

defines precisely and advantageously (to its own business) what it delivers (news articles or the large chunks thereof), as opposed to links to third party servers on which content resides;

promises to always deliver the headline and the lede of responsive articles, along with additional content as well (depending on the client's order); and

produces click-through rates that are very substantially lower than those produced by other aggregators, suggesting that Meltwater is fully superseding AP (and its licensees) as the source for AP content (and newspaper content generally).

Meltwater actually opposed the filing of this amicus brief in the first place, arguing that the newspapers are too close to the action to be considered mere "friends of the court." The newspapers publish AP content and pay membership fees to the wire service.

However, late last week US District Judge Denise Cote allowed the brief to be filed and it's now part of the record in the case. Cote is considering the two sides' dueling motions for summary judgment, and a ruling could come anytime.

Briefs have also been filed in this case by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Computer & Communications Industry Association [PDF], a tech industry trade group that includes Google as a member. Both groups are supporting Meltwater.

This isn't the AP's first fight against an online news aggregator. It sued the Moreover news-tracking service in 2007. Later, it sued an outfit called All Headline News, forcing it to pay up and stop rewriting AP headlines and leads without permission.

In this case, the media companies are striving to make plain the differences between Meltwater and a search engine like Google News. But plenty of news services take the position that Google News is a copyright violator in its own right. Agence France-Pressesued Google in 2005, then settled two years later. Google may well have ended up in the same kind of conflict with the AP if it hadn't struck a licensing deal in 2010.

Disclosure: I have worked in the past for both The Associated Press and Agence France-Presse.

I use Google Reader. It alerts me to a range of stories (including Ars Technica's), and gives me anything from just the headline to several paragraphs.

Is this infringing on copyright? Without it I wouldn't be able to decide which Ars stories I am interested in reading in full or commenting on. Without it I would probably come to Ars Technica once or twice a week, instead of several times a day.

Seriously, newspapers, you can either make the most of digital or you can fail - your choice. Suing someone for pointing their customers in your direction is a "fail" choice.

The existence of a licensing market should not transform what otherwise be fair use into infringement. Were it otherwise, you could nix all of fair use by offering to license any snippet for your content for any use, but at prohibitively expensive prices.

That they are trying to prevent the reproduction of even so much as a headline makes me extremely uncomfortable. Imagine if referencing books or movies by name were to be infringing on copyrights, that would be insane.

That they are trying to prevent the reproduction of even so much as a headline makes me extremely uncomfortable. Imagine if referencing books or movies by name were to be infringing on copyrights, that would be insane.

We were close to that here in Germany recently.I'm quite positive that at the current state of lobbying you'll see similar ideas coming up in the US rather soon.

What gets me is that I would have thought the newspaper industry would be jumping at the chance for people to be talking about, and linking to their sites? The more people visiting the site, the more people staying to look at other stuff, and potentially staying.

At a time when the industry is struggling you'd think they wouldnt be fighting to block people finding them.

I worked as a journalist for several years, including as the managing editor of a small weekly newspaper. We decided to only post two per week to the website because we were afraid of A) cannibalizing our own print product and B) news aggregators competing against us using our own content. We even had one man approach us asking for our content to feed what was essentially a hyper-local ad-supported news aggregator. What were we to get in return? "Publicity."

There is a significant difference between fair use and a company whose entire business model revolves around the uncompensated use of someone else's material. This is not a case of a big bad content company out to shaft the little guy. It's one company profiting from another company's work.

I worked as a journalist for several years, including as the managing editor of a small weekly newspaper. We decided to only post two per week to the website because we were afraid of A) cannibalizing our own print product and B) news aggregators competing against us using our own content. We even had one man approach us asking for our content to feed what was essentially a hyper-local ad-supported news aggregator. What were we to get in return? "Publicity."

Okay, so information available in one form can make it difficult to sell that information in a different form.

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There is a significant difference between fair use and a company whose entire business model revolves around the uncompensated use of someone else's material.

Not necessarily. Ask Google (as in Google v. Perfect10) or iParadigms, LLC. Making money off of someone else's material, without paying them, can be fair use.

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This is not a case of a big bad content company out to shaft the little guy. It's one company profiting from another company's work.

Again, profit is a factor, but not necessarily the most significant one.

Also, as has already been pointed out here, if the AP's arguments are taken at face value, quoting a headline or title is infringing copyright. That's an amazingly strong claim, since merely writing 'Macbeth' would, according to this argument, make me fair game for a lawsuit from anyone who has published a work by that name since 1923, no matter the medium.

Now, I don't know whether or not Meltwater is infringing copyrights, since I don't know what they do in enough detail to pretend to judge. I do know enough about copyright law to know that until there's a ruling, nobody else knows either. Before then, it's all about threatening people with penalties large enough to make them pay up rather than face the possibility of being found to be infringing.

That they are trying to prevent the reproduction of even so much as a headline makes me extremely uncomfortable. Imagine if referencing books or movies by name were to be infringing on copyrights, that would be insane.

Don't be foolish. They're not interested in stopping anyone from doing anything. They just want to be paid for it.

Sorry, it's called Meltwater "News". I know a few real journalists who do more than online recherching and just taking their stories and profiting from them without some kind of payment is plainly wrong.

There is a significant difference between fair use and a company whose entire business model revolves around the uncompensated use of someone else's material.

Not necessarily. Ask Google (as in Google v. Perfect10) or iParadigms, LLC. Making money off of someone else's material, without paying them, can be fair use.

In both of your cites the use was found to be transformative, which is what made it fair use. Perfect10's images were transformed into thumbnails by Google was found to be a different use than what the original photographs were used for (reference vs ogling). In Vanderhye v iParadigms, the "Turnitin" program used student papers to compare and test for plagiarism was also found to be a transformative use. For one thing, no "person" actually read the copied papers, only a computer program. Typically a transformative use does not compete with the original use and does not negatively impact its market.

On the other hand, Meltwater News uses AP's material for the same use that AP does and would not be a transformative use. It may be fair use for some other reason, just not transformative use. Meltwater's profiting from the competitive use would be a big strike against a finding of fair use.

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This is not a case of a big bad content company out to shaft the little guy. It's one company profiting from another company's work.

Again, profit is a factor, but not necessarily the most significant one.

In the 4 pronged test for fair use, Profiting from infringement is a huge factor against a finding of fair use, with the only exceptions being where the infringing use is entirely different than that of the original use (i.e., transformative use).

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Also, as has already been pointed out here, if the AP's arguments are taken at face value, quoting a headline or title is infringing copyright. That's an amazingly strong claim, since merely writing 'Macbeth' would, according to this argument, make me fair game for a lawsuit from anyone who has published a work by that name since 1923, no matter the medium.

I'm not sure where you're getting this idea from that AP will sue for simply copying a headline or story title. The article mentions AP's objections to the copying of "headlines and ledes"—ledes being the opening summary paragraph(s) to a news story. Also as someone else has already mentioned, news has traditionally been treated differently under the "hot news doctrine," though whether or not that exception survives in the digital age is unsettled.

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Now, I don't know whether or not Meltwater is infringing copyrights, since I don't know what they do in enough detail to pretend to judge. I do know enough about copyright law to know that until there's a ruling, nobody else knows either. Before then, it's all about threatening people with penalties large enough to make them pay up rather than face the possibility of being found to be infringing.

It seems to me that Meltwater's best fair use defense is that it does not copy the entire news piece for its customers, though I'm doubtful that's enough to outweigh that its copying does compete with AP. But copyright law in the digital age is full of surprises and each fair use case has to be tested on its merits.

Sorry, it's called Meltwater "News". I know a few real journalists who do more than online recherching and just taking their stories and profiting from them without some kind of payment is plainly wrong.

How far do we take this argument? I know plumbers, electricians, and carpenters who do hard work, and people everyday profit from it without any sort of ongoing payment. Many of the people who profit from this work never, ever paid the craftsman!!!111 Nobody seems to think that this is a big problem, even though it's a clear violation of your implied principle of 'you benefit, you pay'.

... the most valuable expression news media create and market, namely headlines and their ledes.

Gotta give the newspapers credit for coming up with a new term to sue about. They know suing over the headline would get the case thrown out. And since Meltwater isn't copying the entire article they can't sue about that. They're afraid to even sue for copying the "headline and lead paragraph" because that doesn't sound bad enough and Meltwater could just copy less and be fine.

Instead they come up with this "expression" idea so they can shift the focus to something non-concrete, as if Meltwater is stealing their meaning. Reminds me of Oracle suing over the SSO of Java.

I'd love if the papers had to answer in court "Exactly how much do you consider it fair use to copy without having to pay a fee?" Then watch them squirm, wanting to scream "NOTHING!" but knowing it would sink their case.

Sorry, it's called Meltwater "News". I know a few real journalists who do more than online recherching and just taking their stories and profiting from them without some kind of payment is plainly wrong.

How far do we take this argument? I know plumbers, electricians, and carpenters who do hard work, and people everyday profit from it without any sort of ongoing payment. Many of the people who profit from this work never, ever paid the craftsman!!!111 Nobody seems to think that this is a big problem, even though it's a clear violation of your implied principle of 'you benefit, you pay'.

If everybody would only use, say RSS feeds from Reuters directly, the only people paying the news corporations would be people who want to control what is in the news. That's what's really bugging me.

I'm sorry I don't have the time to voice all my arguments or formulate them correctly at all, but it's a busy day at work and I only have short breaks. I might get back to this once I'm home. Just know the plumber (generally craftsman) analogy doesn't quite cut it here.

Seriously, newspapers, you can either make the most of digital or you can fail - your choice. Suing someone for pointing their customers in your direction is a "fail" choice.

The problem is that the customers have demonstrably subsequently not gone in their direction - the last item in the amicus brief, saying that the click-through rates from Meltwater were much lower than from other providers, is the crux.

This is a company that supposedly takes news from tens of thousands of sources and every day produces a report in which it states "your company and/or your direct competitors and/or these topics you're interested in, showed up on the news today in these newspaper articles", headlines, links and some analysis of it or something. How is that the very same thing the AP provides an not transformative?

Seriously, newspapers, you can either make the most of digital or you can fail - your choice. Suing someone for pointing their customers in your direction is a "fail" choice.

The problem is that the customers have demonstrably subsequently not gone in their direction - the last item in the amicus brief, saying that the click-through rates from Meltwater were much lower than from other providers, is the crux.

One interpretation of their business model:

Meltwater sounds less like a news "delivery" service but more of a "coverage rating" service. Their customers are interested in whether coverage of them is positive or negative but not so much in what is actually said. Heck, the argument could even be made that they do "transform" the news - but the transformation is a massive reduction to "good" or "bad". A business that gets a bunch of coverage might have hundreds or even thousands of articles about them and just wants to see a pie chart: 60% favorable, 25% neutral, 15% unfavorable. Little desire to see what was written, possibly hitting just a couple samples in the huge list of linked articles; bye-bye click-through rate. (Edit: kruzes posted along similar lines a few seconds before I did.)

Considering it in that light, it's not at all surprising that click-through rates are lower than for typical readers that search for news.

Funny how newspapers all subscribed to these services before, but now see them as a threat because they are on the internet! It also shows they still don't understand the internet and the computer age. There are thousands of these all over the world. Get rid of them in the U.S. and surprise, surprise you can still find them. Waste of time, money and figuring out how to use these services to their benefit. Newspapers in this country are begging to be obsolete. My fav site for this is not in America. http://www.newsnow.co.uk/h/

The problem is that the customers have demonstrably subsequently not gone in their direction - the last item in the amicus brief, saying that the click-through rates from Meltwater were much lower than from other providers, is the crux.

That's not necessarily a 'problem' unless you make the default assumption that all these 'customers' were AP's to begin with. Despite the lower percentage of click-throughs from the Meltwater users, AP could still be seeing more traffic in total than they otherwise would in the absence of this particular aggregator (as well as other aggregators).

So, although not as far flung as the dishonest arguments of "1 download = 1 lost sale" used to overstate the impact of piracy, we're being asked to accept that a lower click-through rate from an aggregator site stands as evidence that the copyright holder isn't being fairly compensated.

There is a significant difference between fair use and a company whose entire business model revolves around the uncompensated use of someone else's material.

Not necessarily. Ask Google (as in Google v. Perfect10) or iParadigms, LLC. Making money off of someone else's material, without paying them, can be fair use.

In both of your cites the use was found to be transformative, which is what made it fair use. Perfect10's images were transformed into thumbnails by Google was found to be a different use than what the original photographs were used for (reference vs ogling). In Vanderhye v iParadigms, the "Turnitin" program used student papers to compare and test for plagiarism was also found to be a transformative use. For one thing, no "person" actually read the copied papers, only a computer program. Typically a transformative use does not compete with the original use and does not negatively impact its market.

On the other hand, Meltwater News uses AP's material for the same use that AP does and would not be a transformative use. It may be fair use for some other reason, just not transformative use. Meltwater's profiting from the competitive use would be a big strike against a finding of fair use.

Even though we don't have enough details in the article to say one way or the other it does sound like they are more into presenting a summery of favorable, neutral and unfavorable articles that mention some of the clients keywords (like their company name, or maybe a competitor). It includes the headline lead and link to the article, and possibly the sentence the keyword is in. How is that not transformative on the whole?

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This is not a case of a big bad content company out to shaft the little guy. It's one company profiting from another company's work.

Again, profit is a factor, but not necessarily the most significant one.

In the 4 pronged test for fair use, Profiting from infringement is a huge factor against a finding of fair use, with the only exceptions being where the infringing use is entirely different than that of the original use (i.e., transformative use).

So summarizing in the way mentioned above is not different enough for fair use?

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Also, as has already been pointed out here, if the AP's arguments are taken at face value, quoting a headline or title is infringing copyright. That's an amazingly strong claim, since merely writing 'Macbeth' would, according to this argument, make me fair game for a lawsuit from anyone who has published a work by that name since 1923, no matter the medium.

I'm not sure where you're getting this idea from that AP will sue for simply copying a headline or story title. The article mentions AP's objections to the copying of "headlines and ledes"—ledes being the opening summary paragraph(s) to a news story. Also as someone else has already mentioned, news has traditionally been treated differently under the "hot news doctrine," though whether or not that exception survives in the digital age is unsettled.

It certainly is the feeling that most of us gets when it comes to newspapers, if you want to use anything from us then you pay for it.

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Now, I don't know whether or not Meltwater is infringing copyrights, since I don't know what they do in enough detail to pretend to judge. I do know enough about copyright law to know that until there's a ruling, nobody else knows either. Before then, it's all about threatening people with penalties large enough to make them pay up rather than face the possibility of being found to be infringing.

It seems to me that Meltwater's best fair use defense is that it does not copy the entire news piece for its customers, though I'm doubtful that's enough to outweigh that its copying does compete with AP. But copyright law in the digital age is full of surprises and each fair use case has to be tested on its merits.

Does the AP actually provide the service that Meltwater does, a.k.a watching for specific keywords and in how favorable context they are used in? If not then they aren't competing with the AP.

I use Google Reader. It alerts me to a range of stories (including Ars Technica's), and gives me anything from just the headline to several paragraphs.

Is this infringing on copyright? Without it I wouldn't be able to decide which Ars stories I am interested in reading in full or commenting on. Without it I would probably come to Ars Technica once or twice a week, instead of several times a day.

Seriously, newspapers, you can either make the most of digital or you can fail - your choice. Suing someone for pointing their customers in your direction is a "fail" choice.

That's called an RSS feed, and the content (including any ads the ORIGINAL provider, such as Ars Technica, chose to include) is stored on and served from the original source. It's no more infringing than using Google Translate on a whole page: you're still visiting the actual page and they're getting their clicks and views, you're just viewing it THROUGH another site at the same time.

RSS has been around for a long while (Aaron Swartz helped develop it), and it is awesome. It's also provided by the content originator, not the aggregator, generally (and that includes Google Reader).

Nacko wrote:

That they are trying to prevent the reproduction of even so much as a headline makes me extremely uncomfortable. Imagine if referencing books or movies by name were to be infringing on copyrights, that would be insane.

While you're absolutely right, it's a fine line, you also have to understand where the news paper is coming from. Because these companies have no interest in the actual content of the articles, they don't NEED the rest of it. Their interest, as the article stated, is the general sentiment and tone, which is typically contained within the headline and subtitle (just look on Ars itself to see how this is true.) Because of that, a customer that would otherwise pay for access or visit the site itself (thus generating the ad revenue they're complaining about not getting), no longer has to, since they're already getting everything they needed/wanted, and no longer need to visit (thus depriving the originator of ad revenue). That's the issue being complained about, and it's not entirely illegegitimate as a complaint.

At the same time, and I think the more important aspect, is that the article is right about the danger to fair use, as are you. If simply informing someone of the title and subtitle of an article, or book, etc. is infringing, that takes things to an obscene extreme, almost the opposite of something in the book Metagame. In Metagame, companies monitored everything, and you would actually receive payments for name-dropping (and they even call it out for what it is) their products in conversation with someone else (interestingly this influences the culture and it is considered a faux pas to name-drop when talking to your social betters, but I digress). What's being described here has the potential to become a payment for the privilege of name-dropping. Because other than monetizing it, how do you differentiate in law between a name-drop and infringing copying of the headline (it's not like they're claiming to have wrote it, merely repeating the headline)? Were this to stand up in court, it would logically encompass sharing links on facebook/google+, as the result is the same: headlines and subtitles (often even the headline image!) alongside ads that don't go to the originator of the content. I don't think it needs any explanation for why this would be a Bad Thing™.

EDIT:@Blacke

Don't feed the trolls. Ruddy is a well known (and delusional) copyright maximalist that has difficulties with reality. Most of us have him on our block lists right next to OrangeCream and TitaniumDragon.

Don't feed the trolls. Ruddy is a well known (and delusional) copyright maximalist that has difficulties with reality. Most of us have him on our block lists right next to OrangeCream and TitaniumDragon.

Well, I don't know Ruddy's history very well (although I've been here a long time), but his post was not trollish. It was well-written, answered a previous poster with a reasonable tone, and used evidence to back his claims.

I wouldn't call that being a troll (in this instance), whether you agree with him or not.

This is a company that supposedly takes news from tens of thousands of sources and every day produces a report in which it states "your company and/or your direct competitors and/or these topics you're interested in, showed up on the news today in these newspaper articles", headlines, links and some analysis of it or something. How is that the very same thing the AP provides an not transformative?

Because the copied material (headline, lead, snippet) is read for the exact same meaning it had in the original.

blacke wrote:

ruddy wrote:

hpsgrad wrote:

yesterdayjones wrote:

There is a significant difference between fair use and a company whose entire business model revolves around the uncompensated use of someone else's material.

Not necessarily. Ask Google (as in Google v. Perfect10) or iParadigms, LLC. Making money off of someone else's material, without paying them, can be fair use.

In both of your cites the use was found to be transformative, which is what made it fair use. Perfect10's images were transformed into thumbnails by Google was found to be a different use than what the original photographs were used for (reference vs ogling). In Vanderhye v iParadigms, the "Turnitin" program used student papers to compare and test for plagiarism was also found to be a transformative use. For one thing, no "person" actually read the copied papers, only a computer program. Typically a transformative use does not compete with the original use and does not negatively impact its market.

On the other hand, Meltwater News uses AP's material for the same use that AP does and would not be a transformative use. It may be fair use for some other reason, just not transformative use. Meltwater's profiting from the competitive use would be a big strike against a finding of fair use.

Even though we don't have enough details in the article to say one way or the other it does sound like they are more into presenting a summery of favorable, neutral and unfavorable articles that mention some of the clients keywords (like their company name, or maybe a competitor). It includes the headline lead and link to the article, and possibly the sentence the keyword is in. How is that not transformative on the whole?

Because the headline and lede, which is copied and provided to the client to title and summarize the content the keywords were found in, is the exact same use as in the original headline and lede. The headline is copied as a headline and the lede is copied as a lede to summarize. They are proof and context for the data that's been gathered.

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So summarizing in the way mentioned above is not different enough for fair use?

Perhaps you don't understand that the summarizing is "done" by verbatim copying of the headline and lede or other verbatim copying from the article, and that copy is then provided to the client. No one is claiming that the data scraped by the service on the number of times a company or competitor is mentioned favorably or not is the infringement.

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Does the AP actually provide the service that Meltwater does, a.k.a watching for specific keywords and in how favorable context they are used in? If not then they aren't competing with the AP.

As was quoted in the article, AP claims:

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If the massive, systematic copying of expression engaged in by Meltwater is held to be fair use, the AP (and others) would lose not only the revenues that Meltwater and others of its ilk should have been paying, but also the revenue that other media monitoring services and aggregators have been and are paying for licenses, based on their correct understanding that the routine commercial copying of the amount of expression taken by Meltwater is not fair use. A holding of fair use here would evaporate those revenues in short order.

Don't feed the trolls. Ruddy is a well known (and delusional) copyright maximalist that has difficulties with reality. Most of us have him on our block lists right next to OrangeCream and TitaniumDragon.

Well, I don't know Ruddy's history very well (although I've been here a long time), but his post was not trollish. It was well-written, answered a previous poster with a reasonable tone, and used evidence to back his claims.

I wouldn't call that being a troll (in this instance), whether you agree with him or not.

Thanks. Sporkwitch is one of those weenies who is a sore loser in an argument and seeks to silence anyone who holds a different opinion than he or she does.

That they are trying to prevent the reproduction of even so much as a headline makes me extremely uncomfortable. Imagine if referencing books or movies by name were to be infringing on copyrights, that would be insane.

We were close to that here in Germany recently.I'm quite positive that at the current state of lobbying you'll see similar ideas coming up in the US rather soon.

Probably will as I look at all Big content Industries as the MAFIAA.Industries that are Dinosaurs who must Adapt or Die.Long Live Open Source ! End the lame Patent Bullshit ! Stop Copyright Maximalists !

I worked as a journalist for several years, including as the managing editor of a small weekly newspaper. We decided to only post two per week to the website because we were afraid of A) cannibalizing our own print product and B) news aggregators competing against us using our own content. We even had one man approach us asking for our content to feed what was essentially a hyper-local ad-supported news aggregator. What were we to get in return? "Publicity."

There is a significant difference between fair use and a company whose entire business model revolves around the uncompensated use of someone else's material. This is not a case of a big bad content company out to shaft the little guy. It's one company profiting from another company's work.

Except are they selling the content or just saying "Hey, by the way, you guys appeared in the New York Times this morning. Here's the headline, lede, and a link to the story if you want to print it." As far as I'm aware, none of the news organizations offer a service like that where it spans multiple publications.

As webitude said, this this service doesn't sound very different from Google Alerts at all. Come to think, I know that the news publishing companies aren't very found of Google either so I wonder if they're trying to get some case law set up so they have a better chance fighting Google later?

I know that newsrooms are suffering greatly right now (my mother was a journalist with a major paper until she saw the writing on the wall and got out) but the current way they're trying to handle things isn't going to help them. Honestly, I think it was a mistake for the papers to ever offer their full content for free but that ship sailed a long time ago and there's no recalling it now. Unless, you know, you're the Wall Street Journal but only one paper has that going for them.

Don't feed the trolls. Ruddy is a well known (and delusional) copyright maximalist that has difficulties with reality. Most of us have him on our block lists right next to OrangeCream and TitaniumDragon.

Well, I don't know Ruddy's history very well (although I've been here a long time), but his post was not trollish. It was well-written, answered a previous poster with a reasonable tone, and used evidence to back his claims.

I wouldn't call that being a troll (in this instance), whether you agree with him or not.

You can find plenty of climate change deniers and young earth creationists that can do the same; it doesn't change much. Give his posting history a gander and then tell me he's worth responding to.

Sorry, it's called Meltwater "News". I know a few real journalists who do more than online recherching and just taking their stories and profiting from them without some kind of payment is plainly wrong.

How far do we take this argument? I know plumbers, electricians, and carpenters who do hard work, and people everyday profit from it without any sort of ongoing payment. Many of the people who profit from this work never, ever paid the craftsman!!!111 Nobody seems to think that this is a big problem, even though it's a clear violation of your implied principle of 'you benefit, you pay'.

If everybody would only use, say RSS feeds from Reuters directly, the only people paying the news corporations would be people who want to control what is in the news. That's what's really bugging me.

As I understand it (and I haven't looked at this very closely at all), the appeal of Meltwater News' services is that they eliminate the vast majority of content that comes through a site, and only provide the tailored content (i.e. headlines and snippets) that a customer is interested in, along with whatever analysis they may add to the snippets. It seems to me that there is real value in removing the unwanted material and 'boiling down' all that news to just what's interesting to the customer (e.g. 'your overall news coverage was positive, associated with keywords xxx and yyy,' or whatever it is that Meltwater does).

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I'm sorry I don't have the time to voice all my arguments or formulate them correctly at all, but it's a busy day at work and I only have short breaks. I might get back to this once I'm home. Just know the plumber (generally craftsman) analogy doesn't quite cut it here.

That's fair enough. I agree that the craftsman analogy doesn't cut it here; it exists to highlight the inadequacy of the principle that if someone benefits from the work of an individual/organization, that someone should pay the individual/organization. We clearly violate that principle every day in a multitude of ways, without ever thinking about it. The trick is to come up with an argument for why journalists (and creators of copyrighted content more generally) should have this principle applied to them while skilled labor of other sorts doesn't deserve it.

This is not complicated. AP is not saying they can't do it, they are saying that the need to pay for it.

Basically, the AP pays reporters, all over the world, to collect news and write articles.They then package these articles into feeds, and sell the feeds to other organisations with the rights to reprint them.

You will notice that everybody who reprints AP stories pays them - it's just that simple.

I don't see why Meltwater should be exempt. They are doing the same thing that NYTimes and every other AP customer does - look thru the feed, pick the stories their readers will be interested in, and then distribute them, in whole or in part, for profit.

If AP was saying that MeltNews could not do this, or needed AP's permission, that would be one thing. Instead, they are are simply saying that MeltNews needs to pay for the permission to reprint, just like everyone else.

This idea that that the actual people who do the actual work of collecting news are somehow inferior and detrimental to the echo chamber is just silliness. They are the ones with real boots on the ground in Syria and Egypt and other places, they were the ones inside the Superdome during Katrina, etc.

If you are going to profit off their hard work, pay into the system. It's not all that hard or expensive. If your business model is built on someones else's labor, you can't expect to profit off it with out compensation.

This is not complicated. AP is not saying they can't do it, they are saying that the need to pay for it.

Well, of course the AP would claim that anyone who wants to refer to their articles should pay them. The question is whether or not there's a legal obligation on the part of Meltwater to do so. I don't think that anyone here is in a good position to know whether or not such legal obligation exists.

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If you are going to profit off their hard work, pay into the system. It's not all that hard or expensive. If your business model is built on someones else's labor, you can't expect to profit off it with out compensation.

MeltNews is being greedy and shortsighted.

See my comments above about plumbers, electricians, and other craftsmen. Lots of people benefit from their labor without even thinking of compensating those who do the labor, and there's certainly no expectation of ongoing revenue from that labor. In what way is journalism (or any other sort of content creation) different?

This isn't to say that Meltwater is obviously not infringing; I don't know nearly enough about what they do to say one way or another. But I do know that profiting from someone else's work isn't enough to be copyright infringement, and it's clearly not enough to cross some social or moral line. Perhaps there's something that Meltwater does do which infringes copyrights, and perhaps not, but the AP's lawsuit seems motivated by the expectation that they get paid by anyone who refers to their work, whether such payment is legally required or not.

Lots of people benefit from their labor without even thinking of compensating those who do the labor, and there's certainly no expectation of ongoing revenue from that labor. In what way is journalism (or any other sort of content creation) different?

Your confusion comes from comparing apples to oranges. Paying for Labor (eg: a Plumber) is not the same thing as paying for the use of a Property (a copyrighted work).